green screen lighting

So, I'm new to stop motion.. I'm having trouble getting my lighting correct for my chroma key.. I started out with two home depot clamps lights with 60 watt bulbs on each front corner of the table.. I'm guessing too bright. Green screen was a mess. Switched to 40 watts. Still too bright I guess. Adding a image to my green screen was all blotchy. I'm now trying what I think are two 10 watt bulbs. Same results. I'm using a 2 x 2 foot table with a lego base plate and green tag board attached at the back. it's still messed up. Green screen images blotchy. Suggestions? Is it to my advantage to work with a bigger table set up?

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Have you placed your green screen far enough back from the set? Ideally you should be able to light the green screen and the set separately, and not have any spill onto the characters or set. If you do have spill, they show a green tinge around the edges and this will cause problems when keying.

Have you placed your green screen far enough back from the set? Ideally you should be able to light the green screen and the set separately, and not have any spill onto the characters or set. If you do have spill, they show a green tinge around the edges and this will cause problems when keying.

You don't mention what camera you're using to capture with, nor what you're using for compositing the green screen. These would be key info to understand the blotchiness.

I started out my first tests with a webcam (Logitech), and my green screen was blotchy because webcams compress their images. That quickly showed me that I needed to use uncompressed images as source images. Switching to a cheap Canon DSLR was the ticket.

Without knowing these details, I can recommend that you see if your images are becoming compressed by something in your pipeline, so that the values for green are pretty pure and uncompressed.

(I have a strong opinion about greenscreen and miniatures. It can be a pain in the butt to get it to look right, so be prepared to spend a good amount of time tweaking it. I do it very sparingly. I feel that a background environment that is real is best. You get the joy of crafting a world with found and improvised materials. Just my opinion. )

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